A couple of years ago I ran a course about cinema and fashion at the Glasgow Film Theatre. During one of the classes we explored the connection between ‘60s sci-fi films and fashion. One of the films I picked to explore this connection was Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968). 
I must admit that some clips taken from the films caused great hilarity in the room, but things started changing when we got a bit deeper into the topic and analysed how many times Jane Fonda changed her attire in the film and how those costumes influenced fashion in the following decades. There are eight costume changes in the film but the most striking thing is that all the outfits are made using experimental materials such as plastic and metal. The film costumes were designed by Jacques Fonteray, but it was Paco Rabanne – famous for his dresses made of Rhodoid plastic or metal discs strung together with wire and his chain mail evening gowns – designed Fonda’s outfits.
The film - taken from Jean-Claude Forest’s comic - follows the adventures of Barbarella (Jane Fonda), a sexy space traveller on a mission to find scientist Durand Durand and save the world. The film was shot in Italy and produced by Dino De Laurentiis (who claimed last year a remake of the film was in the pipes) and the costumes were also made in Italy by the Rome-based Farani tailoring house.
Pietro Farani, its late owner, established the tailoring house in the early ‘60s and became well-known in Italy for his collaborations with costume designer Danilo Donati in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s and Federico Fellini’s films. Farani started his tailoring house during the golden years of Italian cinema, when many foreign production houses chose Italy as their set since shooting there was rather cheap.
In the past there were two main trends for what regarded costume design in Italy: there were costume designers who favoured historical accuracy, and others who liked experimenting. Donati and Farani opted for the second trend and Farani’s tailoring house soon became a sort of extraordinary workshop that created fabulous costumes for cinema, theatre and television productions, using the most amazing materials. Farani often used fabrics to create contrasts with other materials – such as plastic, paper, straw, metal and shells – turning costumes into unique works of art that sculpted the body of an actor or actress.
In 1967 Farani worked on the costumes for Barbarella and actually went to Paris to look for some of the materials that had to be used, such as metal plaques. Some of the most unusual materials Farani used for the Barbarella costumes are elastic raffia, plastic and chain mail. Carlo Rambaldi, E.T.’s father, created instead the costumes for the guards: entirely made in leather, the scary outfits comprised a jacket, trousers, a helmet, a hooked glove and a glove with a whip incorporated.
Barbarella was one of the first examples of films that inspired new and exciting fashion trends. The latest Barbarella fashion victim was probably designer Antonio Berardi who, for his A/W 08-09 collection seems to have added to the more traditional Barbarella body-conscious metal armour outfits a hybrid parachute-like cape-trail.
If you want to see some good shots of Jane Fonda as Barbarella, check out Magnum’s David Hurn’s exhibition at London’s Atlas Gallery. Hurn was the official photographer on the set of the film in 1967 and some of the prints that will be part of the exhibition are rather rare and portray Fonda wearing the skunk fur-like outfit she gets from Mark Hand (Ugo Tognazzi) or the infamous chain mail top and red chamois leather pants while being surrounded by a few killer dolls. 
The exhibition opens today and David Hurn will also be there for a talk. So if you’re London-based and you want to know more about Barbarella, rush to the Atlas Gallery now.
David Hurn: Barbarella, 12 June - 30 August, Atlas Gallery, 49 Dorset Street, London W1U 7NF, Tel. 0044 (0) 20 7224 4192
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